https://englishkyoto-seas.org/ Valerie Mashman The Story of Lun Tauh, “Our People”: Narrating Identity on the Borders in the Kelabit Highlands Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, August 2020, pp. 203-229. (<Special issue>“Stories across Borders: Myths of Origin and Their Contestation in the Borderlands of South and Southeast Asia,” edited by Monica Janowski and Erik de Maaker) How to Cite: Mashman, Valerie. The Story of Lun Tauh, “Our People”: Narrating Identity on the Borders in the Kelabit Highlands. In “Stories across Borders: Myths of Origin and Their Contestation in the Borderlands of South and Southeast Asia,” edited by Monica Janowski and Erik de Maaker, special issue, Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, August 2020, pp. 203-229. Link to this article: https://englishkyoto-seas.org/2020/08/vol-9-no-2-valerie-mashman/ View the table of contents for this issue: https://englishkyoto-seas.org/2020/08/vol-9-no-2-of-southeast-asian-studies/ Subscriptions: https://englishkyoto-seas.org/mailing-list/ For permissions, please send an e-mail to: english-editorial[at]cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 49, No. 2, September 2011 The Story of Lun Tauh, “Our People”: Narrating Identity on the Borders in the Kelabit Highlands* Valerie Mashman** This article shows, through a historical narrative set in precolonial times in Sarawak, Borneo, how people think of themselves in two contrasting ways, one fluid and one more fixed. The first is lun tauh, which means “our people.” This presents a fluid, inclusive identity through the course of warfare, alliances, and migrations across watersheds and borders. It differs from the second way in which the narrative presents people as thinking of themselves—with the ethnic label “Kelabit,” which came into use with the colonial state. The article goes on to investigate how the relational concept of lun tauh and the reified notion of “being Kelabit” coexist with and interrogate one another and contribute to the identities of peoples who tran- scend national borders and undergo processes of division and separation across natural boundaries, be they rivers, rapids, or ridges. The notion of lun tauh shows that alternatives to bounded exclusive ethnic identities are particularly evident in the borderlands, demonstrating that cultural identities transcend ethnic constructs and territorial borders. This leads to a different way of looking at ethnicity, which is focused less on discrete groups and more on the construction of social identities on the basis of context. The two forms of identity—the fixed reified notion of “being Kelabit” and the wider inclusivity of lun tauh—coexist as strategies for survival for a marginal people, operating at different levels. The narrative demonstrates how local perceptions of ethnicities and identities are bound up with ways for creating larger groups, creating allies, remembering kin across borders, and struggles to claim territory. Keywords: borders, ethnic identity, Sarawak, Kelabit, historical narrative * I have been associated with this village and the Kelabit community for over 30 years through marriage. Fieldwork took place through participant observation and unstructured interviews during visits to the Long Peluan area and related settlements from 1998 to 2000 and from 2010 to 2016. ** Institute of Borneo Studies, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, 94300 Kota Samarahan, Sarawak, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2, August 2020, pp. 203–229 DOI: 10.20495/seas.9.2_203 203 ©Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University 204 V. MASHMAN Introduction The Kelabit are about to forget their history. This is because they have made a “break with the past” (Lian-Saging 1976/77, 211) and are reluctant to talk about warfare and belief systems from the time prior to their embracing Christianity in the late 1930s. So it was a great surprise when, in 2006, I was offered—and accepted—three narratives about the past which included details of warfare, by Malian Tepun, the headman of the longhouse of Long Peluan in the borderlands of Sarawak. Here I will examine the first of these narratives. The narrative, set in precolonial times, shows how people think of themselves in two contrasting ways, one fluid and one more fixed. The first is as lun tauh, which means “our people,” rather than in terms of component ethnic groups, such as being Kelabit, Ngurek, and Sa’ban. In terms of the meaning of identity and ethnicity, this contrasts with the second way in which the narrative presents people as thinking of themselves—with the apparently primordial ethnic label “Kelabit.” This is a term that came into use with the colonial state. A label such as Kelabit defines and reifies ethnicity, while the idea of lun tauh is much more fluid, relational, and inclusive. This article will investigate how the relational concept of lun tauh and the reified notion of “being Kelabit” coexist with and interrogate one another and contribute to the identities of peoples who transcend national borders yet undergo processes of division and separation across natural boundaries, be they rivers, rapids, or ridges. The concept of lun tauh demonstrates that, in the context of a borderland, alternatives to bounded exclusive ethnic identities are particularly evident. This fits in with the discourse of the deconstruction of the nation-state, particularly through the subdiscipline of borderland studies. As Alexander Horstmann and Reed Wadley (2006, 16) note from the perspective of borderland studies in Southeast Asia, “the border concept serves to question the very notion of a bounded culture.” Taking the idea further, Rozanna Lilley highlights the need to redefine ethnicity as “a changing alignment of social groups with neither fixed bound- aries nor stable internal constitutions” (Lilley 1990, 176). This process of redefinition should override any preconceptions regarding cohesion and boundedness, because cul- tural identities transcend ethnic constructs and territorial borders and consist of “a choice of identifications and affiliations that are picked up upon because they seem advanta- geous.” This leads to a different way of looking at ethnicity, which is focused less on discrete groups than on the construction of social identities on the basis of contexts (Lilley 1990, 176). The Story of Lun Tauh, “Our People” 205 Narratives on Borders This article fills a gap by utilizing indigenous historical narratives to provide local insights into perceptions of identities across borders. The demand for this is highlighted by Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel (1997, 238), who call for oral history to be used as a conceptual tool and as a means to explore new sources of knowledge to redress the balance away from the dominant view located at the center—often taken from the docu- mented archives on one side of the border which deny an active role to borderland popu- lations—to the periphery. This is particularly pertinent in Southeast Asia, where in many cases language groups and ethnic identities are shared across borders. As this article illustrates, peoples have long memories of histories of political alliances, trading partners, shared farmlands, and family networks that existed across their own territories, before political borders were imposed with the emergence of the nation-state, when peoples living within the locality of borders came to be split up and marginalized (van Schendel and de Maaker 2014). It is beyond the scope of this paper to survey in detail the literature on Asian border- lands, which is richly interdisciplinary, encompassing political geography (Newman and Paasi 1998), international relations (Migdal 2004), history (Baud and van Schendel 1997; Thongchai 2003; Tagliacozzo 2005; 2013; Scott 2009; Aung-Thwin 2013, 94), and anthro- pology (Horstmann and Wadley 2006) and including cross-disciplinary anthologies such as those edited by Doris Wastl-Walter (2012) and Thomas Wilson and Hastings Donnan (2012). Van Schendel and de Maaker (2014, 4), in reviewing the subdiscipline, note, however, that ethnographic studies have been scarce—although Borneo is probably something of an exception here, as the implications of porosity of borders in Borneo have been explored in the work of a number of anthropologists. This includes the work of Ishikawa Noboru (2010), Reed Wadley (2000; 2001; 2004), and Michael Eilenberg (2012; 2014) for West Borneo; I Ketut Ardhana, Jayl Langub, and Daniel Chew (2004) for the Lun Bawang-Kerayan highlands; and Poline Bala (2000; 2001; 2002) and Mathew Amster (2005; 2006) for the Kelabit-Kerayan highlands. Two themes relevant to this article emerge from studies based in the Kelabit high- lands. First, the Kelabit borderlands is a place where local agency can shape and articulate local meanings of “stateness” and forms of “governmentality,” as the Kelabit have man- aged to utilize the power of the state to assert their own dominance in interactions with their neighbors (Amster 2006, 224). This is linked to the way in which the Kelabit use their reified ethnic construct of “being Kelabit.” Second, Bala (2002, 26) identifies mobil- ity and hybridity of populations as crucial factors in the context of Borneo. I will explore these topics more fully when I go on to analyze the Long Peluan narrative. However, it 206 V. MASHMAN is first necessary to contextualize the setting, to review local notions of ethnicity and identity, and to set the background for the narrator who related the narratives. Long Peluan and the People of the Kelapang River The basis for this article, a narrative which provides a window into shifting views of ethnicity, comes from the longhouse of Long Peluan in Sarawak, a state belonging to the federation of Malaysia, situated on the island of Borneo. Long Peluan is remote; the area is served by a twice-weekly rural air service from the coastal city of Miri. The alternative is to hazard an eight-hour journey along a logging road.